When I was a little girl I dreamed of traveling to other planets, seeing our giant sun rise over Mercury, surfing through waves of gas on Jupiter, and skiing on frozen Pluto. I clung to every space-based fiction I could find, longing to see the beauty in a planet other than our own.
Even as I entertained such fantasies, I chose to be among plants. Playtime was in the garden, where fresh-off-the-tree peaches were my sustenance and climbing trees were space ships. When it came time to do homework I collected flowers and made arrangements to bring a touch of the garden indoors.
When TNG introduced the character Keiko, I caught a first glimpse of how a person so in love with plants could bring their passion with them to space, as the ship's chief biologist and head of the arboretum. She had a busy and rewarding career which revolved both around space & plants. My fantasies drifted in that direction, and so playtime became more garden-focused. What can do well in this spot, how much should I water this plant vs that one? I grew house plants as well, because surely if I were to grow plants on a spaceship I must first keep them alive in my own home.
With an A+ in junior high science courses, I was on the right track. But a B high school honor's Chemistry destroyed my confidence and took me away from choosing to study science in college. I still played with plants, but I studied languages - French & Spanish, linguistics courses, too. I loved the patterns within language, even then unintentionally viewing it from the perspective of a scientist. Then I took general biology from a botanist named Bruce Smith who saw my interest in plants and let me join in his lab's research with plant metabolism. A switch of degree path to Botany followed by a change to another university - I finished my undergrad with a degree in Genetics & Plant Biology from UC Berkeley in 2008 (though the paperwork finally processed in '09). I had picked the ultimate grad program for merging my two intellectual loves - a PhD program in Botany at Miami of Ohio, where I get to work with Dr. John Kiss and Dr. Richard Edelmann on their spaceflight projects, understanding plant response to light and gravity.
I am delighted to be where I am today: studying plants in space: samples of plants grown on the Shuttle (BRIC-16 project, STS-131 shuttle mission) to investigate in the lab, and my little vegetable/herb garden and orchids at home.
